Apollo weighs boosting SoftBank NAV loan to $9B to fund OpenAI bets

verifiedFinanceEnterprise

Thursday, September 17, 2026

Confidence

Medium · — Bloomberg primary + 4 corroborating; size not finalized

Evidence

Bloomberg reporting + secondary confirmations

Bloomberg reported Apollo is in talks to lift a Vision Fund 2-backed loan from $5.4B to $9B to help SoftBank finance its OpenAI stake.

The details

It's a NAV loan against Vision Fund 2 assets, not OpenAI shares.
SoftBank has already committed $64.6B to OpenAI for roughly a 13% stake.

What it means

Frontier-lab capex has outgrown equity — a third distinct credit structure now backstops one company. Private-credit desks should price OpenAI exposure as if a mark-down on Vision Fund 2 could force a paydown.

Bloomberg reported Apollo is in talks to lift a Vision Fund 2-backed loan from $5.4B to $9B to help SoftBank finance its OpenAI stake.

It's a NAV loan against Vision Fund 2 assets, not OpenAI shares.
SoftBank has already committed $64.6B to OpenAI for roughly a 13% stake.

Sources

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Stat of the Day

$105B▲

combined ARR: OpenAI + Anthropic

Rhodium's tally: $40B OpenAI plus $65B Anthropic, versus ~$10B across every measured Chinese AI lab combined. Source

Today’s Take

Three of today's five stories are the same story: the AI industry is trying to lock in the terms of its own oversight while it still has the capital and the revenue lead to set them. OpenAI's framework, Apollo's willingness to lend against Vision Fund 2 marks, and Rhodium's 10x revenue gap all point the same direction — the US frontier labs are self-regulating from a position of strength, not weakness. The commercial layer (HubSpot, Mastercard) is following: agents get invoice-chasing rights and payment rails before regulators finish debating whether they should have them. The bet worth tracking is whether voluntary disclosure survives its first non-voluntary incident. Considered and passed: the King Charles safety summit (symbolic, no binding output) and the Suleyman-Anthropic model-rights argument (podcast-clip sourcing, no peer review).

— Agentic desk

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